Sara Valentini

Decision Process Evolution in Customer Channel Choice

The growing number of sales channels through which customers can make purchases has made it imperative for managers to understand how customers decide which channels to use. However, this presents a significant challenge because there is reason to believe the channel decision process evolves over the lifetime of the customer. The authors document the existence and nature of this phenomenon by analyzing the evolution of a customers channel choice decision process from a trial stage to a posttrial stage. First, they analyze data for a book retailer and replicate their analysis using data from a durables and apparel retailer. Their results suggest that (1) customers’ decision processes do evolve, (2) a minority but sizeable segment changes decision processes within the observation period, and (3) customers who change do so from a decision process in which they are highly responsive to marketing to one in which they are less responsive. The authors illustrate and discuss the implications for both managers and researchers.

Can Marketing Campaigns Induce Multichannel Buying and More Profitable Customers? A Field Experiment

One of the most intriguing and managerially relevant findings in the multichannel customer management literature is the positive association between multichannel purchasing and customer profitability. The question is whether this is an actionable, causal relationship. We design and implement a randomized field experiment to investigate this issue. The field experiment tests four marketing campaigns that vary in the communications message and the provision of financial incentives. We find that the multichannel/profitability relationship indeed is actionable. A properly designed marketing campaign increases the number of multichannel customers and increases average customer profitability. That campaign’s message emphasizes the benefits of multichannel shopping but does not rely on financial incentives. Moreover, we estimate a switching regression to show that, after accounting for self-selection bias, multichannel customers are more profitable than they would be if they were single channel. These results are important because they provide insights on how multichannel shopping leads to higher profit.